With continuous development of Internet applications, information needed to be stored by a network server is growing, and this has caused the storage capacity of the network server to also grow. When the storage capacity of the network server cannot meet the requirement of information growth, the storage of the network server is typically externalized in order to store the information.
Using a Storage Area Network (SAN) to realize the externalization of the storage of the network server is a commonly used technique, and specifically by providing a SAN dedicated external storage environment for the network server. The use of the SAN dedicated external storage environment takes full advantage of new storage hardware and network technology to meet demands, such as storage, access and backup of highly-reliable data with large capacity.
In the SAN dedicated external storage environment, a Fiber Channel (FC) protocol is one of the most widely used protocols, and is applied in the SAN dedicated external storage environment to transmit data based on an FC network. However, a relatively large number of switches, network cards and cables are required to realize the FC network, and this has been known to result in problems, such as high equipment cost, difficulty in maintenance, poor expandability, etc.